Director Zack Snyder finally got to finish and release his version of “Justice League” earlier this year on HBO Max, after an online campaign spearheaded by fans to allow the filmmaker to complete his original vision.
However, even with the release of his vision for “Justice League,” there are still pieces of “what if?” moments because of the budget and time restraints that WarnerMedia levied on Snyder such as not allowing him to include the John Stewart incarnation of Green Lantern played by Wayne T. Carr. Interestingly enough, “Chernobyl” series creator Craig Mazin revealed on the Scriptnotes Podcast back in March that Snyder approached a bunch of writers to help him on “Justice League” back before he left the project.
“I saw the Zack Snyder Cut back when he was working on it. Because they were talking about maybe doing a week or reshoots or something like that,” explained Mazin. “And so he invited two or three – I think there were three or four of us, writers, to watch the movie in the state it was in and then just have a conversation about some things that they might be able to do to tweak some things up over the course of a week of writing. And I, you know me, I’m not like a huge superhero movie guy, but I really liked it. I liked it. I thought it was really good. I thought there were a couple things, like ‘OK here’s some suggestions and things.’ And then Zack left the project. And so that was it. Literally, I think he left like the next week. And I never saw the Joss Whedon version.”
He also praised the final version of the Snyder Cut after all the fanfare surrounding the release, “But all this time while there was this fan movement for the Zack, there was like a mythologizing that the Zack Snyder cut was going to be amazing and it was going to save that movie. And a lot of people are like why would you think that? And I quietly was sort of like but it’s really good actually like I hope that that does happen. But I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to be in the news. Because people are obsessed with this stuff. Well, I watched it last night and it’s fascinating. First of all, it is good. I really enjoyed it. It’s four hours.”
It’ll be interesting to see if Snyder and Craig Mazin will work together in the future as the filmmaker attempts to branch out with original projects at Netflix such as “Army of The Dead” and his re-worked “Star Wars” pitch, “Rebel Moon,” that will be a sci-fi inspired take of Akira Kurosawa‘s “Seven Samurai.“
Mazin is working with Neil Druckmann on HBO’s live-action “The Last of Us” series starring “Game of Thrones” alum Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, which is shooting in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.